Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Push Traffic

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How to make profitable push notification traffic campaigns. (57)

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NOTE: At the time of writing this case study, megapush was a great network but there have been some problems reported in the past months. Please always do your due diligence when trying out a new traffic source! THANKS!

NOTE: I've done this case study for my blog originally (http://www.matuloo.com/how-to-make-p...rom-megapu-sh/), but since we are in need of guides on PUSH traffic here on STM, especially for small budgets, I decided to post it here too. This way it will also be easier to provide additional information and answer possible question, than using the comments plugin on my blog I've made the screens to fit my blog width, so they are a bit small, but still readable so I hope it will do the job.

This test has been done last month, so it's still fresh data and not some years old campaign

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PUSH notification AD format has been gaining lot's of traction lately among affiliates from around the world, being used across multiple verticals and niches. Many see PUSH as the descendent of the POP traffic format, as that has been under scrutiny from Google for a long time … though they are still failing at blocking it and POPs continue to be served in the billions per day But whatever happens to POPs, it's always a good idea to test a new format, isn't it?

First of all, how do these PUSH notifications work? I'm sure you've seen one of those small alert windows, asking for your permission to send you notification. It can look like the one on the screenshot below…



Once a user grants this permission, it's possible to send them push notification at anytime of the day, as often as you like… regardless of whether they are browsing the site they agreed to get pushes from or not. Obviously, they can still revoke the permission at anytime, so it's wise to not abuse the system and keep the amount of pushes at a reasonable rate. Annoy the users to much and they will “unsubscribe”. The screenbelow shows what a push notification message actually looks like, both on a desktop device or mobile phone.



If you want to start working with this AD format, you have basically two options. You can start collection the permissions to send out push notifications yourself … for example on your own website, on your landing pages that you send traffic to etc … OR you can start buying push traffic from a traffic network that already has their own user base. The first option takes time and extra effort, the second one can deliver results instantly … and today, I'm gonna tell you how to do just that.

So how do you start buying push notification traffic? There are several traffic providers that offer this format, so you can go and signup for them one by one, or you can use a network that offers access to several push notification traffic providers at once… so a similar system to any RTB platform you are probably familiar with.

Couple weeks ago, I was contacted by Sergey Konrad, the head of marketing of such a network called MEGAPU.SH … Sergey offered me a promo coupon to test their network with … and I never say no to a risk-free test of course I didn't have any large expectations, but to my surprise the test ended up profitable without all that much effort and I will share the results with you here in this blog post.

FIRST SOME MORE INFO ABOUT MEGAPU.SH

As always, I sent a couple questions to Sergey so we learn something about their network and what they are up to. Here we go with the answers :

1. Hello Sergey, tell us something about Megapu.sh quickly ... when was it started, where do you
operate from and what do you bring to the market.

Sergey: Hi Matej! It’s my greatest pleasure to get to know you personally. Thank you for the opportunity to tell your readers about our platform. Briefly speaking, Megapu.sh is the first advertising network of push-notifications. The platform was created in 2017 in Armenia and was tested privately until it became publicly available in 2018. The network allows delivering native advertising in the form of push-notifications directly to the user’s device from all over the world. It is one of the most innovative and effective ways of promoting products on the Internet.

2. Megapu.sh is a "PUSH" traffic only network, is that right? Do you plan to keep it this way, or will
you eventually start offering more traffic types?

Sergey: No, this network will always be just for push traffic. There are other projects currently under
development, but those will be separate networks

3. Can you tell us more about where this traffic comes from? I know that on top of your own
publishers, you also offer traffic from other networks, how many do you work with?

Sergey: We get traffic from our partner BADBOYS.NETWORK. It is a cross-service platform, engaged in the monetization of push subscriptions.

4. Tell us something about the traffic volumes you have available? How much clicks can you deliver
per day and what are your strongest GEOs?

Sergey: We provide access to the traffic from all over the world. As of today, there are more than 100 million active users with more than 20 million clicks per day. Now the three most active GEOs are Latvia Lithuania, and Indonesia. But in essence, the “strength” of GEO depends more on the product that the user is planning to advertise.

5. Push traffic has been around for a while, but only recently did it start to get full attention of the
affiliates. Why do you think this is the case? Does it have something to do with the attempts of Google to block POP traffic?

Sergey: I do not think that is the reason. As far as I know, not long ago everyone collected push traffic or in-app traffic by themselves. We are the first ones who created an advertising network of push traffic, which now generates more than 29 million clicks every day around the world. In addition, popularity can be attributed to the growing banner blindness that push traffic overcomes with ease.

6. When you look at your numbers, is the available volume going up, down or showing stable numbers
for the past few months? In other words, is the future looking bright for PUSH traffic?

Sergey: I think the future definitely looks bright. At the moment, the volume is growing every day and the limit has not been reached yet.

7. You see all the ads that affiliates run through your network, can you tell us what are the most popular
verticals promoted on PUSH traffic?

Sergey: Megapu.sh allows creating campaigns on a huge variety of verticals. At this moment, the most popular ones are products, dating and sweepstakes. А little behind are gambling and cryptocurrency.

8. Any tips you would like to share with affiliates who would like to test your platform?

Sergey: A couple of simple tips for those who are just starting to work with push traffic:

1. Mobile orientation (I would even suggest focusing on android)
2. Focus more on the “title” rather than on the “description”.
3. More campaigns and more creatives! The creative creation process is not difficult and it’s better
to create more, because not all of them will pass the moderation stage. For instance, create 50
campaigns and test all of them, by setting a minimum bid and limiting the daily budget. Do not
rely on just one campaign.
4. Do not only send notifications to the “closest” countries. Send them as far as possible =)
5. Focus on a small icon, not on a large image.

Thanks for the answers Sergey!

NOW BACK TO THE CAMPAIGNS I TESTED WITH MEGAPU.SH :

There is one thing I like about this network, they allow to run border-line adult stuff, so also dating that I do promote actively. There is one condition though, you have to keep your creatives toned-down, so no nudity or strong language. There is still enough room left for our creative minds though, and using seductive imagery is allowed too.

I had some UK dating campaigns running, with solid payouts, so decided to give it a go with push traffic. First think I did, was to look up the available volume on their volume tool : https://megapu.sh/#geoVolume

There was about 100.000 clicks available per day and that wasn't bad at all. Some GEOs have way more of course, but I wanted to go with UK, since I had solid landing pages for that GEO.

Next step was to create a campaign, which is fairly easy with Megapu.sh … there are no deep targeting options to use, so I just specified the GEO and device … there are more options of course, but for the sake of the initial test, I didn't want to target anything else. But for the future, on top of GEO and device, you can also target ISP, browser, operating system or use IP ranges. You can also select the feeds to buy from, which are actually different channels megapu.sh get't traffic from (this is the other networks and partners).

Once you setup the targeting, you also need a Title (30 chars max) and a Message (45 chars max), plus an image (492x328) and an icon (192x192). They have a crop tool available, so don't lose time with trying to resize the images before uploading them

For the initial text, I used this :

Title : 18+ only, no minors allowed!
Message : Local ladies looking for casual encounters.

Both the Image and Icon were made from the same photo of a busty lady in a car, check the screen below :



Megapu.sh works on a CPC model, so set the bid with this in mind … don't get confused by the sytem they have in place, so when you select 5.00 that means 5 cents per click. It got me confused at first, I thought it was 5 bucks OK, so my bid was 5 cents and I started the campaign.

And this was the initial result :



And here a screen from Megapu.sh … I didn't report leads back to their platform, thats why you see 0 revenue and sales there.



First of all, note that there was a very high discrepancy between how many clicks I was billed for and how many Voluum recorded … There is certain timezone difference, but still, Voluum showed multiples of what megapush billed for. Hard to say what caused this, it might have been some BOTs that megapush identified and didn't charge for… or maybe it's normal with this type of traffic, don't have an answer for this yet. But I don't care about it to much either at this point, since what matter is the ROI and that looked pretty solid.

I wanted to test more ADs and also more offers and LPs … in most push notification sources, it's not possible to rotate images/icons within a campaign, so in order to test more, you need to create new campaigns at the source. So that's what I did, I created 5 more ads with similar texts and different headlines/messages.

Check the screen below :



I kept the same bids pretty much, just tried some with a cent less, but the volume went down that way. When testing new ads on the platform, don't forget to pass some token to your tracker, so you know what ad performed the best. Since it's always 1 ad per campaign, you can use the campaign id token : {camp_id}. I left it running till the test budget ran out, optimizing on the way … pausing some LP's on the way and also adding some new offers in the mix. Once I spent about $190, I paused the campaign to analyze what happened.

The final screen are below :

Total spent on Megapu.sh :



Overall campaign results stats from Voluum, sorted by most profitable offers :



Overall campaign results stats from Voluum, sorted by the best performing LPs, as you can see I paused 2 and only left 1 running, since it was a clear winner :



And here is the final result … almost 25% ROI, not bad cosnidering it was a short test with a limited budget.



THE TAKEAWAYS :

… there is a rather large click discrepancy between what Megapu.sh is billing for and how much clicks a tracker records. In my case it was 4651 clicks billed and 29119 detected by voluum … Keep this in mind when setting the CPC in the tracker and doing optimizations.

… due to the nature of the traffic and how push notifications work, you will be receiving clicks quite large even after you pause a campaign. This is because the notifications are already distributed to users, but some react later on as they didn't notice them initially.

… the ROI is going down as the ads age … I have the best results when it started, then it went down slowly. The solution is to refresh ADs frequently, the more often the better actually. These ADs get saturated quickly.

Based on my tests, PUSH notifications are a great option for new affiliates, the traffic is very cheap and available in solid volumes and it converts surprisingly well. Keep an eye on the quality though, PUSH is lower quality traffic type by it's nature, so make sure you talk with your affiliate managers FREQUENTLY! Do not scale to fast and never without the permission of your affiliate manager.

In case you want to give it a go, feel free to start testing with Megapu.sh and signup on their site : https://megapu.sh The volumes they have available in TIER-2 or TIER-3 GEOs are tempting, and that's exactly the right playground for newer affiliates … but as you have seen, it's also possible to attack the more developed GEOs if you have solid offers available, like I did.

That's all for now, if you have questions, leave them in the comments please.

Good luck with your campaigns.

Matej.

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BOOM! Another epic thread by the legendary matuloo!

This is so detailed it's almost a mini-tutorial - for anyone who's been considering getting into push traffic - act NOW!



Amy

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Nice write-up, thanks for sharing this also here Matej!

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Thanks for a great guide!

A couple of questions:

- How did you get so many clicks? When I target UK with all devices and the same 5 cent bid the traffic estimator says the following: you will get ~0.71% of traffic - 836 Clicks

Even when I change the bid too 100 it says you will get ~3% of traffic - 3534 Clicks

Are these stats simply way off or are the representing something else? Global volume, Daily volume or something else?

- Do you think these camps can be ran continuously? Or are they more one off campaigns? I know you can refresh the images and headlines, but wouldnt you just keep targeting the same subscribers?

Do they have some sort of rotation to make sure your campaigns keep targeting new subscribers?

Thanks again for a great guide!

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Ignore the clicks in Voluum, there is massive discrepancy, I guess it's BOTs or what ... that's why they don't charge for that. Also ignore the estimators, generally, you need to run a test to see what happens. It's also possible that there are higher bids right now, but the numbers you see in the screens are what I actually received from them.

Estimators can suck ... many networks have problems with that.

Even on facebook, you still keep on targeting the same people... it's a bigger pool of course, but the principle is the same. Large adult sites ... plenty of repeat visitors on them, so again the same thing. Every campaign dies at some point for sure, and it's possible that the lifespan will be shorter on PUSH, but you can always grab another offer and build a totally different funnel.

No idea to be honest, will try to ask them and let you know. But yes, they keep on collecting new subscribers and so do the other partner networks so there is some level of freshness coming in constantly.

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definitly a source to go but remember to clearing the shit out 1 from my 100+ lives things there.


Pic is realy small fucking 4k monitor:

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Yup, definitely needs some optimization, I didn't mess with it to much since it was an initial test ... still worked out pretty well to m y surprise

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Great article! Thanks for sharing!

We have push traffic available also if you're an affiliate looking to scale any dating/live cam/adult or similar campaigns and need some extra volume.

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Was waiting for this matuloo... Great case-study.




LeadCloak

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Got any page with the available volumes somewhere?

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Thank you Matuloo I spent over 2k on Megapush the last month to start testing push notification traffic.
I tested several verticals (adult dating, sweepstakes offers, e-commerce COD mainly) with some proven and unproven offers.
I get easily break even with sweeps and adult dating smartlink too but the vertical that really goes well was e-commerce (I'm running tech stuff 'man oriented').
As you told ads don't last for long, I saw campaigns start with insane 500% ROI for 4/5 hours (with lot conversions) then quickly fire down to break even before I paused them. Refresh often creativities and/or launch several fresh campaings during daytime could help give a more stable ROI but it need some good 'manual action' and planning.
ATM I'm using Megapush as a playground to test man oriented e-commerce offers before I run them at Facebook... It seems working but I've got not enough data to tell it for sure ! Working on it!

PS I'm testing Richpush too... I've got one first impression but I need to wait to write it down. I'll do when I'm more confident with that TS.

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Yup, the speed at which ads burnout is really unusual ... not sure yet if its because of the source, the nature of the traffic or something else ... thanks for sharing your experience

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Great share, thank you !

Very strange for the difference, we don't see the same on our side :

Attachment 19881

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The first screen doesn't display, please upload it to imgur and post the "bbcode share" link here.

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Interresting, in your case the numbers almost match ... maybe they changed the click distribution or it depends on the GEO.

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Hey Somebody knows how to use the feed token with Voluum? because {feed} looks not working thanks!

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{clickid}, {feedid} and {camp_id} are the tokens I use.

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You need to configure the traffic source properly in Voluum, which you probably didnt do ... if you want help, shows us a screen of the traffic source setup page.

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I heard some people are having problems tracking clicks or costs but in my case the stats match 99% easily.
I use the {bid} token to track my costs so maybe that's it. Give it a try.

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Thanks,

And what exactly do you use as a Placeholder for External ID?

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cost={bid}&currency=usd&external_id={clickid}&ad_c ampaign_id={camp_id}&source={feedid}

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Ah no I meant in your screenshot behind external_id you have something {conversions_trac.........

I am not sure what that is?

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Hello!

The fresh push-notification network is there, feel free to test - https://datspush.com/

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Hey man, did you have your AM turn off adult redirect prelanders for the offer?

I can't get my camps approved on megapush for dating offers due to the 'content not valid' rejection. Asked live chat and it was due to adult. The push creative wasn't adult but the offer redirect prelander was adult so I'm guessing that was the reason. The offer geo is DE but if you try to access it via the US or any other geo you get an adult themed prelander with nudity. I was direct linking to the DE offer just to test if I setup the camp correctly on Voluum.

I'm thinking there is a way to get an AM to turn off the redirect that occurs if you're not in DE?

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When we approve campaigns and see adult we usually try and always go through it with a VPN to avoid this very situation with advertisers. Very annoying. Maybe try and contacting their support, simply come prepared. With the landing page from DE, and explain the situation. their reasonable dudes, sure you'll make it work

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I contacted them and they simply said 'you have an adult'. Looks like I'll have to get that prelander turned off somehow, hopefully AMs are able to do so. I'll ask them when they're on as its the weekend right now.

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Almost all networks prohibit adult content on the preland. When we work with dating on a smartlink, we ask the affiliate manager to disable the default adult prelands. We are use our mainstream prelands.

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Hey I bought your tool. Any plans for a landing page ripper? I'd be happy to pay for one if you have anything in beta.

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Did you use your own landing page with softcore/non-nude content and a bit toned down language? Or did you send it straight to an adult offer? With all push networks, you need to send the initial clicks to a non-nude page, that way it can get approved.

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Ah okay. I was direct linking so it was straight to the adult offer. I'll use a prelander of my own from now. Thanks.

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Ok that was the problem, adult dating is kinda borderline with most networks, some dont allow it at all and those that do, always require a soft prelander.

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That's always the ideal obviously. But a lot of affiliates take a random smartlink and just run it without actually knowing What's running in the back. For instance, at AdMaven we have manual moderation and a compliance team that scans everything When you manually moderate the tracking link you don't see Adult or only if you opened the smartlink more then 5 times. So you could ask the advertiser to ask the affiliate program to disable the adult landing page, but at what cost? We lost an advertiser and the advertiser lost money on the day he needed this approved with his affiliate program. Adult leaks have always been an issue throughout the industry. The smartest thing I could recommend is just open your smartlink on the right GEO like a 100 hundred times, literally a 100 times to see all of the variations that's running to avoid all of what i described

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Yup, I've had my share of problems with various smartlinks, due to random adult content being thrown in the mix. It's very hard to police, even the smartlink operators cannot 100% guarantee non-adult content, since their advertisers/trafficbuyers are rotating plenty of offers at times too. It's one of those things that make our lives a bit more complicated.

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Well that kind of things for me as a network simply makes the distinction between a CPA/Affiliate network that I trust and those that I don't. Adult leaks are something that you can't tolerate, you can excuse once or twice, but if it's repetitive it causes to end a partnership, no matter how successful it was for a time, it just hurts you as a demand provider and hurts the sites that work with you.

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Yes, I agree that affiliate networks should police this really hard, but from my own experience I know that even the networks have to fight with fraudulent advertisers from time to time. I had this happen to me with 2 very solid networks, the advertiser simply switched the offers without telling them and it took a couple hours, during that time I got my account suspended at a traffic network and took me some time to get it back. All kinds of shit happens

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Yeah, that kind of things is not new to me. It happens from time to time and it causes some damage. Our policy is always to try and understand on whose side is it, the advertiser that works with us or the affiliate above him that provided the link. You don't want to block a solid advertiser that got screwed over. In the end, a lot of this industry is built on trust. You trust people would pay you for the media they bought, you trust people to respect your network compliance demands. It can be rough, but fortunately, so far it's been only a few bed apples

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Amen

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That is one way to go, but what do you do in situations that the advertiser can't control what's running in the back? The main work needs to be with the affiliate programs that provide the link in the first place. If we can't trust the direct advertiser or the affiliate progrem to have proper control it's an issue not only for traffic sources but for everyone.

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Problem is, in certain cases, they just can't, as an mainstream link with an adult leak on their smart link, that is how you can get banned from a traffic source and you didn't do anything.

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Hi matuloo, nice write-up! I would like to introduce you Push notifications in Hilltopads 💙

At the moment our subscribers base is one of the best in the market.
We can proudly tell it because of these reasons:
1) We send only 2 push notifications to user per day. It doesn't annoy them and our CTR shows it.
2) Working with us you can be absolutely sure that you have unique traffic.
3) We control all creatives. We care about our users and show them only good ads.
If you still have not tested our push notification ads contact me. CPM and CPC are available.

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Could you share stats of your GEOs with daily clicks, average CTR, CPCs for mobile push

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Would like to get some more data too, especially the volumes per GEO.

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This is a super useful post, thank you Matuloo. Do you by any chance have a similar study with sending push traffic to a sweep survey offer?
We send quite some push to our in-house surveys and we keep on getting an amazing ROI, but it's always interesting to see how others are doing it.

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I've sent quite a few push clicks to sweeps too, the CC submit samsung sweeps seem to work the best. I didn't compile the data into a case study, but might be something worthy doing

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Hope they can manage it. BTW, is it a mainstream dating Smartlink with Adult leaks, or an adult SmartLink? Did they tell you from when you took the offer it's with adult landing pages? If not, they should be more careful with this, since you can get your advertiser account blocked, and that's the worst-case scenario for something that happens not by your fault

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Yeah, that's the problem with smartlinks, it's not that easy to get the network that provided you with the link to control what's on it. We faced this in the pest, i used to run our CPA offers, and i lost not one site because CPA networks couldn't control the adult landers on their own link. It's really disheartening that you have to cut a successful smartlink because networks can't control their own links

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When you do it this way I guess some users will get multiple push notification for the same offer (and most probably the same lander) - is this okay?


So you create several campaign at traffic source and for each of them you create a campaign in Voluum, right? I did almost the same and see it gets quite confusing to analize data when you run many similar campaigns.

especially when they see multiple ads due to several campaigns running. What is the best way to split test ads (landers ) with PUSH and keep ads saturation low?

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Not sure how much of an issues this is, the user lists that push networks work with are rather huge. But it could happen of course, unless the algo of the network somehow blocks this.

Nope, what I did in this case, was to create one campaign in Voluum. Then I created several campaigns at the traffic source, each with one ad (for the same offer), and linked all of them to the same voluum campaign, while passing the campaign ID token. Then I could analyze the data, broken down by the campaign ID. If they (traffic source) allowed multiple ads in one campaign, I would do that and pass the adID in a token.

I'm not sure how big effect the multiple campaigns had. I'd say it is also connected to the fast burnout rate of the subscribers themselves (due to frequent notifications), others copying the ads and saturating them more etc ... the only way to keep saturation low is to submit new ads frequently.

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Thanks for the guide Matuloo, I was just wondering if for a complete newbie like me [at least when it comes to paid traffic like push] would you recommend starting with propeller ads or mega push ? also when picking an offer is there a vertical u recommend for a beginner? I know this might be too broad of a question but sadly im not experienced yet which is frustrating but ill get there eventually, lol

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Start with propeller and do CPC.

Megapush traffic is shit if your balance is less than $500, which is a touch sell for a beginner. And their UI is torture.

Also read up some of mrbraun and erik's guides on how to do push first.

Start with sweeps or dating. Both are easy and natural for push, great to get started.

(dating won't last long, but you'll get a feel for how push works)

Good luck!

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Oh man thats a fantastic reply you really helped me a lot. I appreciate it ! already got Voluum im going to run my first campaign today.

is there a reason for peoples choice on geo targeting? for instance they know that russias' pop traffic has 90% men so they do dating + russia? or any other concept? or just randomally pick tier 2-3 countries?

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Everyone does it differently. While push is less risky than pops in Tier 1, it will still simply drain your balance if you're just starting.

I would suggest asking your network AM for some good offers in Tier 2/3 to start.

Or

Go through Amy's pop tutorial to get a feel of how everything works, get your tracker, hosting, and landers up and running, then simply run some push campaigns to your existing pop landers.

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Nice sharing mate! This push traffic is work for promote Adsense even I buy traffic from network ?

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I'm not sure about push, it wasn't here when I last did adsense arbitrage, but they do ban for POPs for example due to the delivery model.

Push is different though and many large/legit sites that monetize via adsense are running push notification to alert their user base of new content. So technically, it is ok to use push traffic.

However, the traffic you buy from networks is of very different quality than from the inhouse pushlists of these companies. There will be bots in the mix, some push networks are selling POPs pretending it's push... it can be a mess. So I wouldn't consider this safe. You might get away with it, especially if you prefilter the traffic in some way and only pick the best part of it, but a ban is possible anyways.

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In case anyone new to push checks this out, of course watch out for Megapush. They used to be a good network but they are unfortunately a complete scam nowadays. Not just the traffic you get as an advertiser, but scamming publishers - I myself have yet to be paid about $20K from the crooks.

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Really sorry to hear about this! Let me see if I could get someone from their side to tell their side of the story.


Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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Ouch

Let me put a little note into the original post to make sure people do some background checks before working with them. Not taking any sides, but their reputation definitely took a few hits.

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